artist profile

Isaac Julien

born

1960

lives and works

London, UK

education

BA, Central St. Martin’s School of Art, London, UK, 1984

about the artist

An artist as much as he is filmmaker, Isaac Julien endeavors to strike a common resonance between all forms of art, whether visual, performance, or media. His powerful work has found its singular voice in discussing the polemics of race, sexuality, and gender. Throughout his work, he seeks to immerse his audience through an amalgamation of avant-garde and traditional strategies. Julien has gathered awards from both the art and the film worlds: in terms of the former, they include the Andy Warhol Foundation Award and the Jerome Foundation Award, both received in 1998, and the latter, the Semaine de la Critique Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, in 1991, and the Frameline Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award in San Francisco, USA, in 2001. In 1995, he was also honored with the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship Award, presented to him by the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University in New York, USA. Julien has created site-specific film installations for many of his exhibitions in galleries and museums. Solo shows of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, USA; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France; the Modern Museet in Stockholm, Sweden; and the St. Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, USA.